The Road to Middle-earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien created a new mythology. Tom Shippey

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СКАЧАТЬ its centre is Högni’s decision to fight rather than look for a moment as if he could be bought; the ‘objective correlative’ of pride and decision is the sword Dáinsleif, the ‘heirloom of Dáin’, which the dwarves made and which knows no mercy. The sword Tyrfing in the Saga of King Heidrek edited by Christopher Tolkien is virtually identical – dwarf-made, cursed, remorseless, leading to murder between close relatives and the final lament, ‘It will never be forgotten; the Norns’ doom is evil’. These qualities, it seems, are those which Tolkien chose and developed for his dwarves. Thorin and Company act out of revenge as well as greed in The Hobbit, the long and painful vengeance of Thráin for Thrór is the centre of what we are told of the dwarves in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings, Dáin Ironfoot himself incarnates in Tolkien’s Middle-earth the whole tough, fair, bitter, somehow unlucky character of the dwarvish race.⁸ It is not too much to say that the ‘inspiration’ of their portrayal as opposed to the more laborious element of ‘invention’, springs directly from Snorri and the Hjaðningavíg and ‘Dáinsleif which the dwarves made’. To use Tolkien’s phrase, this was a ‘fusion-point of imagination’, once met never forgotten.

      As for the elves, their fusion or kindling-point would seem to be some twenty or thirty lines from the centre of the medieval poem of Sir Orfeo, itself a striking example of the alchemies of art. In origin this is only the classical story of Orpheus and Eurydice, but the fourteenth-century poet (or maybe some forgotten predecessor) has made two radical changes to it: one, the land of the dead has become elf-land, from which the elf-king comes to seize Dame Heurodis; two, Sir Orfeo, unlike his classical model, is successful in his quest and bears his wife away, overcoming the elf-king by the mingled powers of music and honour. The poem’s most famous and original passage is the image of the elves in the wilderness, seen again and again by Orfeo as he wanders mad and naked, looking for his wife, but never certainly identified as hallucinations, phantoms, or real creatures on the other side of some transparent barrier which Orfeo cannot break through. To quote Tolkien’s translation:

      There often by him would he see,

      when noon was hot on leaf and tree,

      the king of Faerie with his rout

      came hunting in the woods about

      with blowing far and crying dim,

      and barking hounds that were with him;

      yet never a beast they took nor slew,

      and where they went he never knew … (SGPO pp. 129–30)

      Many hints from this took root in Tolkien’s mind: the shadow-army with its echoing horns which was to follow Aragorn from the ‘paths of the dead’, the ‘dim blowing of horns’ as a ‘great hunt’ goes past the silent dwarves in Mirkwood in The Hobbit, and in The Hobbit again the image of the fierce, proud, impulsive, honourable elf-king who imprisons Thorin but will take no advantage in the end even of Bilbo. Stronger than anything, though, is the association of the elves with the wilderness – an idea corroborated to Tolkien by the many Anglo-Saxon compounds such as ‘wood-elf’, ‘water-elf’, ‘sea-elf’ and so on – and with the music of the harp, the instrument by which Sir Orfeo wins back his wife. It may even have seemed significant to Tolkien that in Sir Orfeo the elves freed and rewarded their harper-enemy for his skill, while in some versions of the Hjaðningavíg the dwarvish weapon Dáinsleif condemns Hjarrandi (the Northern Orpheus) not just to death but to death everlastingly repeated. A whole conflict of temperament between two species is summed up in the detail, and a conflict of style. However, the further one traces Tolkien’s debt to ancient texts and fragments, in this matter, the more one realises how easy it was for him to feel that a consistency and a sense lay beneath the chaotic ruin of the old poetry of the North – if only someone would dig it out. To quote Shakespeare’s observations on another Enchanted Wood which sensible people can make nothing of (in A Midsummer Night’s Dream V i):

      But all the story of the night told over,

       And all their minds transfigured so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But howsoever, strange and admirable.

      I do not suppose Tolkien would have liked the down-grading of ‘fancy’, nor the comedy of Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed. Bully Bottom, though, has a Tolkienish bravura; and Hippolyta’s feeling that ‘there must have been something in it’ was his own.

       Creative anachronisms

It was by similar processes of ‘reconstruction’ that Tolkien arrived at his ‘orcs’ and ‘wargs’, later his ‘ents’ and ‘woses’.^* None of the foregoing, however, offers any help at all with ‘hobbits’. If ‘the word authenticates the thing’, they are not authentic, for ‘hobbit’ is in no sense an ancient word. Nor indeed does their genesis seem to have had any element of ‘invention’ in it; it was pure ‘inspiration’, without any trace of thought at all. The moment of the word’s arrival has in fact been recorded by Tolkien, and subsequently by Humphrey Carpenter:

      It was on a summer’s day, and he was sitting by the window in the study at Northmoor Road, laboriously marking School Certificate exam papers. Years later he recalled: ‘One of the candidates had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it (which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner) and I wrote on it: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Names always generate a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like. But that’s only the beginning.’ (Biography, p. 230)⁹

      The incident seems a perfect example of the creative unconsciousness: the boring job, the state of combined surface concentration and deeper lack of interest, the sudden relaxation which allows a message to force its way through from some unknown area of pressure. It is reminiscent of the flashes of insight which solve scientists’ problems in dreams (like von Kékulé the chemist and the snake with its tail in its mouth). But what has philology to do with an event so mysterious and so personal?

      Tolkien had no opinion to offer himself. In a letter in the Observer (20 February 1938), he answered speculation by saying ‘I do not remember anything about the name and inception of the hero’, and denied (without total certainty) that the word ‘hobbit’ could have come from prior reading in African exploration or fairy-tale, as had been suggested. He thought that earlier writers’ hobbits, if they existed, were probably ‘accidental homophones’, i.e. the name was the same but the thing was not. Much later, in a letter he seems never to have posted (Letters, pp. 379–87), he observed that though he could often remember acquiring names this process played little part in the construction of stories. It is somehow typical that the OED should have claimed (Times, 31 May 1977) to have identified Tolkien’s ‘source’ and ‘inspiration’ in J. Hardy’s edition of The Denham Tracts, Vol. II (1895), which declares that ‘The whole earth was overrun with ghosts, boggles … hobbits, hobgoblins’. The word ‘hobbit’ is there, but in a run of distinctly insubstantial creatures which hardly correspond to Tolkien’s almost pig-headedly solid and earthbound race. Words are not things: the name ‘hobbit’ may seem to be for the researcher, a dead-end.

      Even dead-ends have their uses, though (see below). This particular one prompts several thoughts. One is that although Tolkien accepted the word as coming from outside, not being rooted in antiquity at all, he nevertheless did not rest until he had worked out an СКАЧАТЬ